Sunday, February 28, 2016

Sunday Morning Links

- Steve Roth discusses how inequality and excessive concentration of wealth result in less growth for everybody - even as the researchers finding that correlation try to report the opposite.

- Meanwhile, Davide Furceri and Prakash Loungani examine how loose financial and capital regulation lead to more severe inequality. And Daniel Tencer reports on Toby Sanger's work documenting Canada's most damaging tax loopholes.

- Brent Patterson highlights a new paper on how corporate control agreements stand in the way of meaningful action to fight climate change. And Tim Radford writes that we may need to take far stronger steps than previously anticipated to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels in order to avoid a climate catastrophe, while Justin Fisher comments on the need to view climate issues in terms of justice.

- Finally, Luke Savage offers a noteworthy response to the Manning Centre's recent conference - including this observation on how the Cons' leadership contestants look to be out of touch with the social reality facing young voters:

It occurs to me that each and every one of the prospective candidates
for the leadership of the CPC came politically of age at around the
same time in the 1980s or early 1990s, i.e. during the ascendency of
movement conservatism. Then, its calls for “self-sufficiency”, “personal
responsibility”, and “individual liberty” over and against the state
had an emotional and spiritual resonance that often transcended lines of
gender, race, and class. But the lived experience of today’s young
people is quite different from those who consider themselves children of
the Reagan revolution.

In an economic context characterized by precarious work, low wages,
poor financial security, and the widespread exploitation of young labour
by employers (who are often from a different generation) across the
workforce, solutions that emphasize personal grist and the imperative of
an improved work ethic are unlikely to be well-received.

Looking south, it is quite the opposite: Young people appear drawn in
much greater measure to Bernie Sanders’ message, and its various
attacks on oppressive economic structures, than to movement
conservatism’s pickled ethos of “individual liberty” or its various
ideological stepchildren (including the Clintonite variant).

Movement conservatism may have dominated the past three decades. But
everything I’ve observed this weekend suggests the possibility that
something very different may come to dominate the near future.

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